This invention relates generally to databases and in particular to interfacing and interacting with storage efficient systems for managing databases.
Databases store the data that is critical to an organization and thus form an important part of an organization's information technology infrastructure. As the information available in an organization grows, so does the complexity of the infrastructure required to manage the databases that store the information. The increased complexity of the infrastructure increases the resources required to manage the databases and the applications that depend on the databases. These increased costs may include the costs associated with hardware for managing the databases as well as the costs associated with additional personnel needed to maintain the hardware. The increased complexity of the infrastructure also affects the maintenance operations associated with the databases, for example, causing backup and recovery operations to take significantly longer.
In a typical organization's infrastructure environment, production database servers run applications that manage the day-to-day transactions of the organization. Changes to production databases or to applications that depend on the production databases are tested on copies of the databases to protect the production environment. Copies of the production databases may be required for several stages in the lifecycles of workflows associated with the production database and applications that depend on the production databases. For example, the stages in the lifecycle of a change incorporated in a production database may include a development stage, a tuning stage, a testing stage, a quality assurance stage, a certification stage, a training stage, and a staging stage. Making copies of the production databases for each stage requires redundant and expensive hardware infrastructure as well as the time overhead required to copy the data, which may take days or weeks. Additional hardware also requires additional costs associated with physically storing the hardware, such as floor space requirements and costs related to power and cooling. Furthermore, redundant hardware typically causes inefficient use of available resources.
Since databases involve complex manipulations of data and information, database products provide various mechanisms to allow users or database administrators to interact or interface with the database. For example, users and database administrators can interact with the database using a user interface, application programming interface, commands, scripts and the like. The mechanisms provided by databases for interfacing with the database can be complex since a large number of commands and options for commands are typically available for manipulating information in a database.
The figures depict various embodiments of the present invention for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles of the invention described herein.